The cardboard beds at the Olympic Village went viral when athletes tested their sturdiness by jumping on them, debunking the myth that they were "anti-sex" beds. But the beds are just one example of the eco-friendly materials featured at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Another striking innovation is the lavender and purple sports flooring introduced during the track events. Traditionally, running tracks are brick-red, but the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics already broke this norm with a blue track.
This year's lavender track not only looks aesthetically pleasing but also has psychological benefits for athletes. The color purple inspires indeed power and energy, but also harmony. The choice of lavender aims to evoke the lavender fields of southern France, while the material itself is even more fascinating for fans of material sciences, it is indeed made from mussels.
Mondo Spa, a global leader in sports flooring based in Alba, Piedmont, Italy, and a veteran designer of Olympic tracks since 1972, partnered with Nieddittas, a prominent fishing cooperative from Arborea, Sardinia. Established in 1967, Nieddittas is renowned for its mussel farming and fishing. Together, they created an innovative production chain that repurposes mussel shells, promoting environmental sustainability.
Typically, running track flooring is made from calcium carbonate, naturally found in chalk, limestone, and marble, and usually obtained through mining, which contributes to carbon emissions and landfill waste. This year, however, Mondo developed a new running track compound incorporating shells from bivalve mollusks like mussels and clams, rich in calcium carbonate.
Nieddittas handles the production, cleaning, and preparation of the shells, which are then ground into powder. This eco-friendly supply chain transforms waste into a valuable resource, creating a new generation of resilient and sustainable flooring. This bio-inspired approach applies biological knowledge to flooring design, biogenic calcium carbonate is indeed used to offset emissions equivalent to a Euro 4 diesel vehicle driving 60,000 km.
Additionally, this process prevents the disposal of dozens of tons of waste in landfills, demonstrating how recycling mussel shells reduces CO2 emissions and mitigates mining's environmental impact.
This collaboration resulted from three years of research and experimentation in the laboratories of both companies. After receiving initial calcium carbonate samples from Nieddittas in 2021, the teams assessed the technical feasibility and necessary treatments for use in Mondo’s formulations. The companies also aligned business processes with natural cycles, such as using sun drying for the mussel shells, further enhancing sustainability.
Through these innovations, the Olympic Games showcase how biomaterials and eco-friendly technologies can support athletes and promote environmental sustainability.
Yet there's more. The lavender sports flooring is proving successful not only for its color and material but also for its performance - it is indeed helping athletes run faster. Manufactured with the collaborative efforts of mathematicians, engineers, chemists, and physicists, alongside professional athletes, the track is designed to be two percent faster than the Tokyo Olympic track. This is achieved through a layer of honeycomb air cells that absorb and return the energy of a runner’s foot.
The underlayer of the track incorporates a new generation of the polymeric granules inserted in the Tokyo Olympic track. These newer tracks are generally more elastic: multiple algorithms are used to optimize the shape and dimensions of the elliptical air cells inside the track, reducing energy loss and potentially improving performance.
Thanks to its with a geometric structure the lower layer of the track provides shock absorption, energy storage, and energy return. The top layer of colored rubber compresses under an athlete’s foot, absorbing the impact and converting the stored energy into forward momentum. This minimizes impact and vibration, enhancing athletic performance.
The track is also consciously designed for Paralympians, guaranteeing a good grip for wheelchairs and prosthetics, and works better with the new generation of athletic shoes.
Fashion-wise, the pastel lavender allows the fluorescent orange, green, chartreuse and yellow shoes of the athletes to pop on TV, drawing viewers' eyes to the feet and generating interest in consumers.
The collaborations between Mondo and Nieddittas offers significant benefits as it promotes environmental sustainability, but also contributes to economic development. Local Italian companies have indeed been involved in managing the technical aspects, ensuring that the final product is an excellent substitute for mineral calcium carbonate.
Can this be applied to other fields, and can other materials be used (will we be able to reuse the exoskeletons of crustaceans, such as shrimps, lobsters or blue crabs at some point)? Time will tell, in the meantime fashion may want to look into the matter and check out innovative biomaterials for runways and catwalk sets.
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